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Jul 27, 2016

How To Control Your Life

Part 89

Poster image for Baby Boom (1987); Diane Keaton with Kristina Kennedy

Ten years ago Baby Boom would have probably starred a man because not until recently, with the great female drive toward careerism and success, would it be believable that a woman could be so ill-prepared for motherhood.

Nancy Myers, writer and producer of Baby Boom, in 1987

The mantra of feminism in the 1970s was ‘You can have it all’.

Precisely what this meant is still being debated today. But basically the idea was that women, like men, are entitled to have both a career and a family. The concept behind this - as in ‘the personal is the political’ - was (is) that society has to change to make this possible.

So the Houses of Parliament had to rethink its toilet facilities and maternity (and later paternity) leave came into being. And so on.

A friend of mine, let’s call her Tish, who is a journalist and a parent said to me one day in a bar in the 1980s (i.e. a decade later), à propos this great push for equality: “What we’ve done is earn the right to be perpetually exhausted”.

I seem to spend my whole life ‘making up for lost time’. In the office, for the time I’m with the kids. With the kids, for the time I’m in the office. I am quite literally burning the candle at both ends. Living a double life but within the same 24-hour day.

Most of the working mothers I know are exactly the same. The ones that appear to have it all are very few and far between. Most of us just stretch ourselves as thin as is humanly possible and muddle through. And that’s not to say that stay-at-home mums aren’t tired also. They are physically far more wrecked than those of who are cosily parked at a computer all day. But there is a unique form of mental exhaustion that comes with having to adjust to two entirely different roles of a day.

I absolutely struggle to wind down from the madness of the latest e-mail bombardment in work and readjust to my toddler’s pace of life where he doesn’t expect me to spout buzz words or go into bat on whatever the ‘burning issue’ of the day is. He just expects me to give him a hug and wipe his nose. As soon as I walk into the house I have to remove my ‘office’ head, and replant my ‘mummy’ one. My two lives are entirely different, requiring completely different skill-sets and personalities, and that, whilst liberating in many ways, is also exhausting.

So Mum, thank you for the opportunity. And thank you for blazing a trail so that thirty-odd years later I would have the option of following it.

But, I will never be Superwoman. I will be Mediocre Mum. And mediocre staff member. And that, I’m afraid, for the moment at least, is the best I can hope for.

Claire Micks, Motherhood and Work: ‘I accept that I’ll never be Superwoman - I’ll be Mediocre Mum’, TheJournal.ie, 7 August 2014

So that would be three decades on.

Meanwhile, back in what used to be a man’s world:

So, as Harold Macmillan said (well, sort of but the paraphrase is snappier than the original) “You’ve never had it so good”.

What, exactly? What is this good ‘all’ that we’ve got - apart from exhaustion and stress, of course?

Irrespective of your gender, your age, your race, your class or whatever, you can have a career, you can have a family, you can live wherever you like and lead the life you want.

And if you believe that, I have some pieces of London Bridge, a statue of Tutankhamen’s aunt, and the original Magna Carta I could sell you.

Yes, you can be an astronaut or you can be a painter or you can have two children and homeschool them both. You can storm the City and make a mint by the time you’re thirty. You can snap up a rural farm and raise rare breed pigs organically. Anything you like. You pays your money and you makes your choice.

Ay, there’s the rub as the man said (Shakespeare, through the mouth of Hamlet, in this case). Because you have to make a choice. It’s not a question of someone stopping you doing it all - you simply can’t do it all. Even if you run every day into exhaustion, burn the candle at both ends, and have good genes which provide you with boundless energy and everlasting youth, you can’t do it.

It takes around seven years to train as an architect. To have a chance at becoming an astronaut you’ll need a good degree in engineering, mathematics, science or the like, 1,000 hours (minimum) of flying time in a jet and preferably have a military background if you want to become a pilot astronaut, be incredibly fit, be mentally fully stable (according to a battery of tests run by the agency to which you’re applying), be the right height and within the right age band - do you need any more of the picture? How long have you got? Not right now, but in your lifetime. How long are you going to live?

If you want to rear children, something’s got to give. If you want to go straight back to work, or nearly so, after giving birth to them then you will need to earn a fair amount of money to pay someone else to do the parenting for you. If you want to do the parenting yourself, you’re going to have to find a way of taking time off work or out of your career without damaging either your finances or your career path.

There are choices - and decisions - to be made.

If you want to control your life you have to make those choices and decisions. And in making them you have to accept that you are closing doors. You have to say goodbye to the options you reject. You have to give up the road you’re never going to travel. In fact lots of roads.

There are many people around (at least one in every bar and pub in the land, and it won’t take you long to find them) who will tell you, at some length, how they could have been or nearly were a singer, a doctor, an HGV driver, an engineer, a computer programmer - if it hadn’t been for their mother/father/ spouse/lack of money/lack of time/poor schooling or butterflies in the wheels. They would have, could have, done it if only they hadn’t got married. Or had children. Or needed the money for an extension on the house. They would have had children - but it would have killed their ice dance career.

And they’re right. If you get married just as you’re starting out on your career, you’re limiting the choices within that career. (You can’t move around the world at the drop of a hat, perhaps, or work eighty-hour weeks for years on end.) If you want to stay in your career as an ice dancer then you can’t have children because it changes your balance in the wrong way.

What these people aren’t right about is that it was the fault of their parent or spouse or lack of school or whatever. They made a choice.

If they’re complaining, then they’re not admitting that they made that choice. They’re hiding behind the fact of their marriage, or their poor schooling - perhaps because they knew they’d never make it as a singer or an astronaut so they veered off in another direction. But they’re not admitting it.

Don’t do that to yourself. You can have it all, in that it’s all on the menu (or, let’s be practical, nearly all - on any menu something is always ‘off’). But even the greediest gourmand in the world can’t eat everything on the menu in one meal. Choose. You will need to think long and hard about it (do you really want four pasta courses? can you afford the lobster thermidor? is the indigestion worth it if you choose the lady finger mascarpone orange dessert?). You will need to work out what you really want, what you can live without, and what you definitely don’t want. You will then have to plan. Because if you don’t plan, and set goals, and a timescale (stages along the way), you will scupper your chances. And if you don’t keep to the plan, keep hauling yourself back on track, you won’t succeed.

If you want to ‘have it all’, it’s about making choices, getting organised - and taking control of your life.

Twitter: Maryon Jeane